Dear, dear. What they failed to see was that this was the most imaginative and original fashion statement Paris has ever seen. Although it’s true that other designers have occasionally tossed the odd fat lady onto the catwalk, no designer has ever shown a complete collection on people who so challenge fashion’s assumptions about beauty, elegance and appropriateness. Since the 1960s, fashion has relied on the freakish nature of models — over-thin, over-tall, over-beautiful — so much that it now can’t imagine its clothes on real people. After all, who is more freakish: a woman with full breasts and rounded thighs, or one so skinny that her hip bones actually project further than her breasts?

Galliano’s decision not to use standard fashion figures on his catwalk was a gauntlet thrown down to a business that has allowed itself to lose touch with reality.

And the clothes? Everything we saw was full-strength Galliano fashion, and didn’t cease to be so because it was worn by an old woman or a fat man. Galliano gave not only meaning, but life to his creations by putting them in vignettes reflecting reality — from the ageing heiress anxiously watching her polo-playing stud to the trouserless sugar daddy clinging on to his beautiful young wife.

What was so offensive? Acres of well-padded flesh always make fashionistas nervous, but the real problem was Galliano’s use of dwarves. More than 30 years ago, Diane Arbus, whose retrospective is currently packing them in at the V&A, used her lens to show the hypocrisy that treats dwarves as inferiors merely because they are small. Nothing has been learnt since. People still feel an irrational discomfort in their presence. Galliano meant to shock and confront. It was courageous and humanitarian to do so, but if it is to be anything more than a quick-fix exploitation both of audience and models, he must realise he has rewritten the rule book. If his show is not to be seen as a cheap, cruel gimmick, he must continue to present his clothes on models who do not fit fashion’s narrow idea of acceptability. How else can he educate the fashion world that clothes can be shown as successfully on a short, fat or tall person as on the standard model, and still look desirable? Of course, people in the real world have known that for a long time. It’s the experts who need to grow up.

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